Dumbest mistake you have ever made

[earlz]

Wow.. been there done that. lol..

Makes me think of one time I was having severe trouble with my OS randomly failing on trying to do userspace multithreaded stuff.. After debugging for a few days I finally figured it out. I went to crt0.asm and found

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;...
mov ebx,0
mov [ebx],10 ;test if page faults work

call _main
;....

[bitshifter]

Recently dumbest...

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mov ds,[g_segment1]
mov es,[g_segment2]

Took me two days to find that one

[thepowersgang]

Recently I found a bug in my FAT directory code that had been there for about four years.

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if(disk->bootsect.spc == 1)
	offset += (dirpos / 16);
else
	offset += (dirpos / 16) % disk->bootsect.spc;

(The problem is that if SPC == 1, it's treated as SPC == 2, so when I directory is > 1 cluster with 512-byte clusters it will read junk)

[ATC]

It was probably when I first started programming, and was trying to write a "game" with DirectX9. I had only been programming about 2 months, and got the bright idea that I should introduce some good ol' multi-threading to my project. All the "game" did was let you throw and push some boxes around on terrain and look at the 'pretty' physics. I don't remember quite how the code worked, but I basically set it up so EVERY box's collision detection had its own thread (and some hideous recursions). Problem was, you could create unlimited amounts of boxes, and there was no disabling on idle ones. To make a long story short, after playing with it for 2-3 minutes my computer first froze with a sound effect being played hundreds of times a second. This quickly turned into a blue screen of death then to a black screen with the ominous "Dumping physical memory". I absolutely PANICKED! Needless to say, I basically trashed all of that code and thanked my lucky stars that I didn't destroy anything. I was on edge for quite a while after that one. LOL!

[bluemoon]

In the old days when I was fresh, I'm debugging a weird crash of my server program running on BSD, the program crash kinda randomly;
and it turns out that the crash is due to my attempt to debug - I'm overwriting the image and causing "bus error" XD.

It took me a week of debugging going thru' the code inside out, and then I realized it don't crash in holiday, and learnt it the hard way.
this incident still give a good laugh when I talk to my friends.

[arjo129]

Mine was even worse, I speant a whole 2 years working on a kernel and finally when I compiled it, it showed a black screen. It took me 2 days to figure out that I forgot to call the main shell.

[crossedeyefreak]

I never called a string into the VGA memory.